This year, when the smoke finally clears, Linda McMahon, the soft-spoken, fire-breathing "job creator," will have tucked in a second $50 million in her own money for her failed political aspirations.

Again, she fell short in running a Republican contest for U.S. Senate in a state that is so blue than President Obama ventured here only to appear as a glittery fundraising photo opportunity at Harvey Weinstein's Westport shack.

This year, the Yankees, with $196 million in salaries, failed to reach the Series.

McMahon, striking out brilliantly, lost by about the same 12-percent margin by which she fell short in 2010 to now-U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal.

I don't begrudge McMahon -- doyenne of pro wrestling, where she's lived a 36-year arc that started with bankruptcy and led her to "job creator" -- from trying to join the most exclusive club in the world.

What has less heavy lifting than U.S. senator, where your staff does your work, where you walk the chambers of power like a demi-god and all you have to do is show up and look vaguely interested?

At her grandmotherly age, as she kept pointing out, I could understand why she'd want to be known more as a national statesperson than someone who presided over cage matches, crotch kicking and the degradation of women.

McMahon, to her credit, created plenty of jobs in this latest failed effort. Makers of TV commercials, pollsters, opposition researchers, political strategists, they all cashed big checks. And yes, she employed inner-city residents.

The night before the election, I was driving out of the Capitol and by Bushnell Park in Hartford when I saw a big van depositing people still clad in their blue "Linda" T-shirts, after participating in one penultimate McMahon event or another.

She found almost every little ugly secret in Senator-elect Chris Murphy's closet. The only failing in her attack ads -- she called them "contrast" ads -- was her late-campaign strategy aimed at urban voters, to split their tickets. Asking Obama supporters to vote for her, too, was just too much for the self-esteem of your average Connecticut Republican.

But it worked to some extent, since McMahon got more Connecticut votes than Mitt Romney. President Obama gathered 896,602 votes; Romney, 613,478; McMahon 647,738; and Murphy 829,736. That's a 12.8 percent margin of victory,

In fact, McMahon set a standard for campaigns for the ages. Open bars on primary and Election Night; highly paid staffers everywhere; top-shelf booze and six-figure strategists; T-shirts for everyone; new luxury cars for TV advertising executives.

Unfortunately, because of ill-advised comments caught by reporters on the 2010 campaign trail, McMahon's handlers, this time, kept her away from pesky reporters, giving her unexposed opportunities to chat up potential voters out in the field and memorize her bullet-point mantra for the four debates.

A better candidate, which Murphy eventually became, would have had daily public events scheduled where they accepted questions from pesky reporters, who were acting as surrogates for voters throughout the state. Murphy did and McMahon didn't.

And at one point in the summer, when she was ahead in the respected Quinnipiac University Poll, I thought her campaign-in-a-bell-jar was going to work.

It was around the time I compared the surnames of her campaign manager, Corry Bliss, a happy, scorched-earth warrior, and Ben Marter, Murphy's long-suffering spokesman, a "y" away from a potential human sacrifice.

If there's a lesson to be reaffirmed here, it's that yet again, Connecticut voters are underwhelmed by people running for higher public office without paying some elective office dues.

Now, McMahon, of Greenwich ... Hmmm ... maybe it's a Greenwich thing. Ned Lamont of Greenwich, who crashed and burned in the 2006 race against U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman and the 2010 gubernatorial primary, at least had a term as a selectman and a few terms on the local tax board.

In a couple years, McMahon could invest some big money running for the state House of Representatives or the state Senate, although that ride to Hartford from lower Fairfield County is a time killer that's ill-advised for someone who'll be 66 by then.

So here's an idea for her next $50 million investment.

Linda McMahon gets together with some big hedge fund operator in, say, Greenwich and creates an endowment. Or better yet, she organizes a partnership with an existing nonprofit, such as the Tow Foundation, up in New Canaan.

The Linda McMahon Fund could offer competitive grants to urban school systems for science and math education; and maybe start some after-school programs in the vocational-technical high schools aimed at precision manufacturing jobs that are supposedly going begging even though unemployment is still bouncing around 9 percent.

Linda McMahon shouldn't be remembered as someone who spent $100 million on losing Senate races. She could harness her inner philanthropist to make Connecticut a much better place without even being elected. And that could be the best kind of public legacy.